Guest Post: The ICC Changes Its Mind on the Immunity from Arrest of President Al Bashir, But It Is Wrong Again

Alter Book Symposium: Comment by Tonya L. Putnam

[Tonya L. Putnam is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Columbia University] I’m very pleased to have been asked to contribute my thoughts on Karen Alter’s The New Terrain of International Law. Alter’s cogently argued new book exemplifies what well-executed interdisciplinary scholarship can achieve. It puts into productive dialogue several core preoccupations of political scientists, international lawyers, and practitioners as they relate to the growing universe of international courts (ICs). Not only does the resulting analysis map the outputs of, and relationships between intensively studied ICs like the ECJ, the ECtHR, and the WTO panel system, and more recently created, and less well-known, ICs and court-like bodies, it simultaneously theorizes the political interactions that create, sustain, confound, and (at times) transform their activities. From it we gain a compelling picture of how new-style ICs are using international law to reshape political interactions spanning the interstate to the local level around issues from property rights to human rights. The contributions of The New Terrain of International Law are too many to enumerate in detail. In the space I have here, therefore, I focus on two areas where future scholars can benefit from the foundation Alter lays in this volume. I then propose a set of questions about whether further proliferation of ICs may begin to complicate international affairs.

Alter Book Symposium: The New Terrain of International Law

[Karen J Alter is Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University and co-direcor at iCourts Center of Excellence at the Copenhagen University Faculty of Law.] The New Terrain of International law: Courts, Politics, Rights uses the universe of operational permanent international courts (ICs), those with appointed judges that stand ready to receive cases, as a laboratory to explore the changing reach and influence of international courts in contemporary politics. In 1989 when the Cold War ended, there were six operational ICs. Today there are more than two-dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. The New Terrain of International Law shows how today’s international courts differ fundamentally from their Cold War predecessors. Most ICs today have ‘new-style’ features, compulsory jurisdiction and access for non-state actors to initiate litigation, which scholars associate with greater independence and political influence. Most ICs today have a mandate that extends beyond inter-state dispute resolution. Chapters in the book chart the uneven jurisdictional landscape of ICs today, and offer an account of the proliferation of new-style ICs. The book is first and foremost a social science treatment of the growing role of ICs in politics today. I argue that the trend of creating and using new-style ICs signals a transformation from international law being a breakable contract between governments towards a rule of law mentality. ICs are not, I argue, the vanguard of this political change.  Rather, the trend towards creating new-style ICs reflects the reality that international law increasingly speaks to how governments regulate national markets, treat their citizens and conduct war, and both citizens and governments want these increasingly intrusive international legal agreements to be respected. For the most part, ICs are doing exactly what governments tasked them to do. International judges are resolving questions about the law, and holding governments and international organizations to international legal obligations. My primary objective is to understand how and when delegating authority to ICs transforms domestic and international relations.